Why Etymologies Matter: How Tracing Words Illuminates History
Why etymologies matter: How tracing words can illuminate history (2024)
In this personal essay, historian Benjamin Breen explores the power of etymology to uncover hidden histories. He shares examples from his own life, such as the Farsi word 'div' (demon) and its Indo-European roots meaning 'god', and the ancient story 'The Smith and the Devil' that may date back 6,000 years. Breen also reveals the surprisingly recent origin of 'hello', popularized by Thomas Edison for telephone use. Through these linguistic detective stories, he argues that words are windows into the past, connecting cultures across time and space.
We say 'hello' to them, and we always receive an answer we didn’t quite expect.
- satvikpendem
A good book on this is Proto by Laura Spinney, it covers all the branches of Proto-Indo-European and also postulates that the entire family may have started from as few as a hundred speakers who were steppe nomads, which is mindboggling if true.
- keiferski
I really love etymology, because I like to imagine words having "lives", and then tracking those lives over the centuries. It's fascinating to think that a word might have begun in China thousands of years ago, migrated to India, then the Islamic World, then Europe, and are now everyday things in English.
- mirmor23
many times, even etymology does not make things intuitive: e.g. 'spendthrift'.
similarly, many English words are close, but their meaning diverge a lot. e.g. condemn vs condone, or vindicate vs vindictive.